The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

hentai

Last week, we wondered whether Tentacle Grape soda was a real product or a funny/tasteless joke that had turned into a scam, since people had placed orders for it with real cash and had yet to see any product. A reader named Harley emailed us to say a box of the soda just arrived at his address today, along with a condom, naturally. Because that’s just classy. He adds, “I can’t comment on the taste as I haven’t yet tried it, but I don’t think I’ll be using the condom.” Click through for a bigger pic.

Really, grape soda with a tentacle hentai theme (don’t Google it if you’re not sure what we’re talking about, especially if you’re at work) just makes sense. Sex-starved tentacled monsters getting it on with anime vixens just cries out to be packaged as a grape drink and sold. But one reader, Lincoln, says he bought his own 6-pack of the drink back at the start of the year and has yet to see it.

We won! Maybe! At least, we’ll take the credit! Good ol’ Amazon listened to our complaints about mixing x-rated hentai when doing searches for hentai and has quickly fixed the problem. Performing a search for anime now returns only the most wholesome of results, while searching for ‘hentai’ returns all the tentacles and demon incest that we hold so dear.

Imagine the outrage from parents if the first returned product on Amazon in a search for ‘movies’ returned a hardcore pornography DVD. Adam, a fan of the Japanese cartoon stories known as ‘anime,’ has noticed something perhaps even worse: Searches for ‘anime’ on Amazon return results for ‘hentai,’ or adult, X-rated anime films. The top result [as pictured] is for a hentai film called ‘Princess 69,’ which as a reviewer describes as such:

If you’re into non-con, excellent animation, girls going down on girls… you might like this. I don’t much care for the enema or watersports parts of this film, but the facial expressions are priceless and lovely. These girls have the most wonderful “I am shocked, my mind has cracked by what is being done to me” expresions, they cry tears, they are bound, taped, mildly electrocuted, made to “initiate” new members, and brutally given sex.

Now we have absolutely no problem with Amazon selling Japanese animation for adults; We know that some cartoons are made with adult themes for adults’ enjoyment. But what we don’t understand is why Amazon needlessly conflates anime and hentai. Many anime fans, often already scorned as creeps by those not familiar with the range of themes offered by mainstream anime, are worried that Amazon’s lack of distinction between anime and hentai will both further the perception that all anime fans are also fans of hentai, as well as put children looking for traditional anime titles in an awkward position.

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